Is GREED good? Gee, I hope so… by Dan O’Shea

Very pleased to wrap-up 2013 on the blog by welcoming Dan O’Shea to celebrate the publication of his second novel, Greed, which is out today from Exhibit A Books (ISBN: 978-1909223158).

How do you feel about re-runs?

See, Ms. White reviewed this book before – quite a while ago. At the time, the title was The Gravity of Mammon and it was an experiment. I wrote it live, on my blog, posting the chapters as I finished them – two or three a week at the start, then, as I got rolling, a chapter a day until it was done. Took a couple months all in. Just a draft at that point, but I was pretty happy with it.

Ms. White liked it enough to review it then, almost three years ago. Now, it’s out in print form, though with a new title – Greed. Well, a second new title. For a while it was the title was shortened to just Mammon, then it was changed to Greed. The path to publication has been a long, strange trip.

See, back when I did the blog experiment, my first novel, Penance (which was published in April, 2013) was still making the rounds. One of the big New York houses had almost bitten on Penance just before I started the blog novel experiment – but they had this one tiny problem. Silly me, I thought I’d just redraft Penance to address their concern, they’d buy it and I’d be on my way to fame and fortune. Of course, once I got started, I couldn’t stop and I overhauled the book probably more than I should have. The publisher passed on it, of course, but now I had two pretty different versions of the same book making the rounds. And, while Greed isn’t a sequel to Penance exactly, it is the second book in the series, so they do have to match up.

Thing is, when I wrote what became Greed on my blog, I was pretty confident that the second version of Penance was going to sell, so I wrote my blog novel to follow up on that.

The good news? Penance did sell eventually – to Exhibit A, in a two-book deal that included Greed. The bad news? They bought the original version of Penance, so now I had to re-tool Greed to match up with that. And, as with my attempt to re-tool Penance, once I got into it, I ended up doing far more than I thought.

That gets us current more or less.

How different is the book? More different the further you get into it. Is it better? I like to think so. There’s more going on. When Ms. White reviewed it last time, she said, “To say that author Dan O’Shea has stuffed The Gravity of Mammon to the gills with plot points and action is an understatement.” Well, there are more plot points and action now. I’ll just cross my fingers and see what Ms. White has to say. But I’m betting it’s the first time she’s ever reviewed a book twice.

You can’t read this one for free on my blog, though. You’ll just have to buy a copy.

Dan O’Shea is a Chicago-area crime writer represented by Stacia Decker at the Donald Maass Literary Agency. His first two thrillers, Penance and Greed, are available from Exhibit A. Drawing on Chicago’s settings and history, the novels explore the city’s history of corruption, but with a national, even international flavor. Dan is also the author of Old School, a collection of short fiction published by Snubnose Press. You can find out more about Dan at his blog, Going Ballistic.

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